Epilogue
Eugene
The snow engulfed the Russel estate, soft flakes drifting under the dim lights that illuminated the courtyard. I stepped out for a minute, letting the cold hit my face. I needed to feel it. My head was pounding again, my vision pulsing at the edges as I tried to ignore it.
Too much had happened in too little time.
I braced my palms on the railing, staring out over the grounds. It was quiet… peaceful even.
But I didn’t belong in anything peaceful.
Last night blurred in my mind. The shouting, the kitchen, Genevieve… my mother’s voice, her hands on my face, the way I broke against her shoulder like I was a child again. Shame crawled hot up my throat.
I shouldn’t have needed that. And I hated that it helped silence the noise, helped ease the pain.
I also shouldn’t have watched her with him. But I did. Saw the way Reid… my—my father held her. The way she let him. Like they’d fought and survived a war to be here. Maybe they did.
Despite her tears, despite the lies, the discretion… she looked happy, warm, alive… reminded me she wasn’t a ghost of my past anymore.
The door clicked softly behind me… I thought it would be Juliet, coming over to talk to me, ease my mind like she always did. She always came when things inside my head got too loud, always reached for me even when she didn’t understand what she was reaching into.
But the footsteps were too careful, too familiar in an entirely different way.
Always sneaking up behind me, pulling at strings I didn’t want tugged, making me feel things I didn’t want to. But I’d feel them anyway, because I had no choice.
“Getting some air?” Brielle said gently, stepping beside me as she hid her hands in the sleeves of her sweater dress, the cold front already nipping at her nose.
“While I can, yeah…” I muttered, and she gave me a soft smile. Her hands tugged at one another, her lip catching her teeth in a nervous lip bite. Her obvious tells over the years never changed.
“Sorry about last night,” she whispered.
I gave a shrug. “You’re not the only one who is.”
She went silent, staring off in the same direction as I was. I placed my elbows over the rails, sighing a breath of fog into the cold.
“I don’t…” I began uneasily. She waited patiently as I shook my head. “I don’t know if I’m ready for her… for him… for this.”
“You don’t have to be,” she said gently.
I shook my head. “I already fucked up our relationship… I don’t need another one I can’t hold together.”
Her hand found my back. “You know that's not true.”
I let out a labored sigh. “You don’t get it,” I said finally, pulling away from her touch. “This—” I gestured toward the lights, the warmth inside, the easy way everyone seemed to fold back into each other’s lives “—all of this comes easy to you.”
“Eugene.”
I shook my head. “Love, acceptance, family. For years I didn’t know what to do with the abandonment, ran away so I could survive it. And I ended up leaving the only person I had. You were all that mattered to me and I just… I fucked everything up.”
“You didn’t—”
“I did,” I snapped, then lowered my voice immediately.
“I left you. You were all I had and I still left you. I don’t know how to come back from that.
I don’t know how to be here without feeling like I’m an intruder in a life that went on just fine without me.
I don’t know how to accept the woman who did the same to me, to us. ”
She watched me carefully, not interrupting, letting me unravel at my own pace before she stepped in front of me fully, forcing me to look at her. Then she cupped my face with both hands, warm palms against my cold skin, grounding me in a way only she could.
“Eugene,” she said softly, firmly, “you still have me.”
I wanted that to be true. I wanted to accept that I wasn’t alone, that I had a family. That I had a wife, had a daughter, had a sister, had a mother in my life.
But I couldn’t.
I closed my eyes, jaw clenching, breath shaking. “I’m so fucked up, Brielle.” She didn’t flinch at my words. She just held my face steady, thumbs brushing lightly at the tension in my jaw. “God, I still don’t know how you put up with me after so many years.”
A smile graced her lips. “Because you’re my brother,” she murmured. “And because you’ve spent your whole life thinking you’re harder to love than you are.”
I sighed. “You don’t know what goes on in here,” I muttered, tapping my temple. “You don’t know how loud it gets. How broken I am.”
“I do know,” she whispered.
“I don’t know how to be here,” I said again, but my voice wasn’t harsh this time. It was thin. Weak but honest. “Everything in me is wired to leave, shut the world out before I get left again.”
Brielle leaned forward until her forehead met mine. “Then stay until it doesn’t feel like leaving is the only choice,” she whispered. “Stay until you believe you deserve to be with us.”
“I don’t know if I can,” I choked out.
She shook her head. “You can,” she insisted quietly. “Because you’ve already done the hardest part.”
“What’s that?”
“You came back… for me.”
I didn't answer her.
But I didn't pull away either. Because I did come back for her. For so long, I’d run from the abandonment, shut the world out, disappeared into the noise in my head.
But I still came back for her. After the army, even now in something small allowing her to drag me to a family dinner or force me to come to her holiday parties. And I loved her more each time she did.
My arms wrapped around her small frame, pulling her in for the hug I desperately needed. I wasn’t a good brother by any means… but she still wanted me as her brother. Still loved me like I’d never left her.
“I love you so much, Brielle.”
She lifted to her tiptoes, her hands wrapping around my neck as she pulled me in closer.
“I love you, Eugene.” Her voice cracked gently, her face hiding in the crook of my neck as our tears fell quietly.
And for what felt like forever we stayed there, basking in the presence of one another like we were all we had left.
But as the celebration continued inside, my chest warmed at the idea that it was more than just us now.
Pulling away after some time, I nodded toward the door. “You should head back in to the fun. I’ll be inside in just a minute.”
She smiled softly, squeezing my arms once as she brushed my cheek with one last lingering touch before heading inside.
The door clicked behind her and silence washed over the courtyard. I let out a long breath, dragging a hand through my hair.
Maybe… maybe things could get better.
I could be the father Melanie needed… could be the husband Juliet deserved. For the first time in years, the idea of being part of this family didn’t feel like a lie anymore.
Maybe I could give my mother a chance… give my… my father room to be a part of who I was. It wouldn’t solve the past, wouldn’t fix our future… but it would be a start.
I stood there, holding onto that fragile hope like it was the first real thing I’d felt in years… when my phone buzzed in my pocket.
One single vibration that had me pulling it out. The screen lit up with a number I didn’t recognize.
A cold, crawling pressure ran up the back of my neck as I opened the message.
YOU’RE SLIPPING, SOLDIER.
My pulse kicked, my stomach dropping to the floor, heartbeat racing in my chest as another message came through.
IT’S TIME YOU COME HOME.
Then a photo loaded.
OR ELSE.
Not of the base I tried to forget or the desert I was trapped in, or of the bunker where he’d broken me down to bone and rebuilt me into something unrecognizable.
No.
It was a picture of the Russel estate. Taken from the treeline in the dark. From inside our perimeter.
Behind me, the snow cracked softly under invisible footsteps, my ears ringing as a shadow fell over me, reading the message beside me. The voice that lived in my walls, in my pulse, in my sleep, he whispered, low and amused, his words crawling up the back of my neck into my skull.
“Well that’s not fucking good, now is it?”
My breath shook. The warmth from the house behind me felt a thousand miles away now.
I stared down at the message again.
Family. Hope. A future. Gone in a second.
All replaced by the truth I could never outrun:
Because I wasn’t just a brother. I wasn’t just a son or a husband or a father.
I was a weapon, government property, a military-grade soldier trained to kill. But now…
I looked toward the tree line where that photo had been taken. Anger burned through my veins, my eyes narrowing out into the void.
But now… I had a family. A reason to live, a reason to die, a purpose, something to protect that was mine.
And for the first time in years… I wasn’t going to run from my past.
Not when I finally had something worth fighting for.